Mt. Gox, the cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed in 2014, faces a repayment deadline of Saturday, October 31, 2026. As of October 15, rehabilitation trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi has made no announcement about extending the deadline or closing the proceedings.
According to Arkham Intelligence, Mt. Gox-linked wallets still held about 34,388 BTC as of September 30. Converted at the October 14 price (1 BTC ≈ $83,400, $1 ≈ ¥158), that is worth roughly $2.87 billion (about ¥450 billion).
The repayment deadline has been extended three times since the original deadline in October 2023. The extensions were announced on September 21, 2023, October 10, 2024, and October 27, 2025, which was about 40, 21, and 4 days before the deadline, respectively. The lead time has shrunk each year. Each extension was approved by the court.
The 2024 and 2025 notices cited a substantial number of creditors who had not completed the required procedures, or who had not received their payments because of problems in the repayment process. According to the trustee, more than 19,500 creditors had been repaid in BTC and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as of March 2025.
The extensions so far have covered the deadlines for the basic repayment, early lump-sum repayment, and interim repayment. The rehabilitation plan separately provides for a “final repayment,” to be made after disputed claims are resolved.
Article 188, paragraph 3 of Japan’s Civil Rehabilitation Act provides that, when a trustee has been appointed, the court decides to close the proceedings once the rehabilitation plan has been carried out or is deemed certain to be carried out. As long as the final repayment remains outstanding, the proceedings will likely continue past October 31.
In an October 2022 notice, the trustee also explained that creditors who do not select a repayment method and register their payee information by the deadline will be repaid in Japanese yen cash at the head office or other designated location, and that if they cannot collect it, the amount will be deposited with a legal affairs bureau. Some overseas media reports claim that “rights are forfeited after the deadline,” but this cannot be confirmed in the trustee’s public notices. The trustee has also warned of emails that falsely claim the repayment deadline has been moved up in order to lure recipients to fake sites.
The balance of about $2.87 billion mentioned above is roughly the same size as net inflows into U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs in September (about $2.65 billion, according to SoSoValue).
When repayments began in July 2024, BTC briefly fell below $54,000. However, the state of Saxony in Germany was also selling seized BTC at around the same time. CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju has pointed out that spot trading volume did not surge after Kraken distributed funds to creditors. According to CryptoQuant’s data, withdrawals from Kraken (transfers to external wallets) actually increased.
On the other hand, on June 2, 2026, about 10,300 BTC was moved out of cold wallets, and on June 4 the price of BTC fell below ¥10,000,000 for the first time in about three months. That week, however, also saw BTC sales by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and the release of the U.S. jobs report. Most of the moved BTC has stayed at new addresses, and no large deposits to exchanges have been confirmed.
Japan’s crypto regulation moved to a registration system for exchange operators in 2017, prompted by the Mt. Gox collapse, and in July 2026 an amended Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, which treats crypto assets as financial products, was enacted. Iolite also covered the shape of exchanges after the transition to that law in its feature in Vol. 21, “Survival Strategies for Crypto Exchanges: The New Order After the Shift to the FIEA.”
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